The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Hey Wellness Wednesday, I've completely lost faith in the motte this week. See I've used "I think I fucked up my niece/nephew by playing a single song/tv show/movie" as a premise about a dozen times over the course of my life, and the only time it was taken seriously was with a group of college freshmen. Everyone else immediately understood that it was a premise, because you would have to be totally disconnected from reality to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview. 100% disconnected, Being There disconnected.
But the thing is, I know the motte isn't full of freshmen, it's full of gen xers and millenials. And yet posting here was the second time my ridiculous premise was taken seriously. I used to make jokes 10 times as convoluted on /r/cwr and everyone got them, and when I'd do one on the motte I'd get accused of going for cheap laughs!
So it brought to mind a lot of other things I have noticed over the past few months, which can be summed up like this - I no longer believe I am stupider than the average motter. But, and this is the important part - I still know I'm a fucking idiot. Half of the cwr threads might as well be written by markov bots these days, there are still quite a few insightful comments every week, but so much of the rest is just rote bullshit. Just everyone talking down to each other, using passive aggressive laziness to evade the modhats - but not even making it entertaining, it's just talking points vs talking points.
I want to feel stupid again. I want to have to bring my a-game again. I don't know how to make that happen.
Oh, wait, I was skimming and didn't even read this part. This is just flatly wrong. Single pieces of media do sometimes change the entire direction of peoples' lives. I've seen it happen! I mean they technically don't change someone's "entire worldview" because that's not really possible, but definitely can be critical very large personal changes. And yeah, I know, everything changes slowly and maybe the piece of media was just a "straw that broke the camel's back", but in my experience that's only partially true. Which makes sense, "media" broadly are stories that are designed to be as compelling as possible to people, and the reason we like stories is that we learn from them. It just makes sense that strong resonant "emotional" experiences could influence someone.
Now of course it's very rare for that to happen, given how much people read and watch and listen in their life, and even if it does happen it's probably better to let the person evolve by learning new compelling information even if it makes them partially wrong for a time, you can let them fail and figure it out later.
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Come on man.
But how else do you think beliefs/worldviews are shaped? Lived experiences usually, sure, but I believe it's the 21th-century
schizoidmodern man we're talking about, whose lived experiences account for like 20% of his actual sum total of EXP points (guilty as charged, at least), the rest is pixels or letters. Do you totally deny the ability of artistic media able to change people's minds in any way, or is the issue that inducing anything less than an immediate and total crisis of faith is not enough?I join other commenters below in their admission of being thoroughly influenced by media, mostly vidya in my case: Bioshock planted seeds of doubt against libertarianism which persist to this day (even if I was a countryside rube and knew jack shit about e.g. coordination problems at the time), Persona 3
made me a robofuckerintroduced the careless teenage me to the concept of death and its consequences, etc. Call me shallow if you like, but I firmly believe that the correct response to "to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview" is "that but unironically", and media doesn't actually have to be "deep" (which is subjective as hell anyway) to get the proverbial noggin joggin - it just has to resonate with you to some extent that you begin to think on the evoked themes independently. It is indeed closer to a spiritual experience instead of anything literal.Feel free to consider this a midwit take because it kind of is, but I struggle to understand or agree with your viewpoint. I'll posit that either it's the air you're breathing to some extent, i.e. you're so accustomed to thinking along the lines of or drawing inspiration from various intellectual works that you don't notice the influences in your thinking, or that you've actually never experienced that distinct "THIS HOLE WAS MADE FOR ME" feeling of inexplicably clicking together with a piece of media, a sensation definitely not age-restricted to zoomers or millenials, in which case I respectfully sympathize.
Am I wrong about the average age here? The joke was that I was afraid this kid would watch a movie and suddenly flip his entire worldview, a premise that was mocked mercilessly when I was growing up, because "everyone knows" that nobody is influenced by just one thing, everything is a confluence of the innumerable stories everyone hears all day every day. That doesn't mean media doesn't have an influence on people, of course it does! But nobody becomes a nihilist after watching fight club one time, just like nobody becomes a libertarian after reading atlas shrugged and nobody becomes a mass shooter after playing doom - there are a thousand other stops along the way there, and if it looks like an immediate turn that is because prior stories predisposed the person to absorb that influence.
I chose the words "a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview." very carefully, to avoid this exact tangent.
So the issue is that inducing anything less than an immediate and total crisis of faith is not enough for the purposes of your joke?
Not carefully enough, it seems, they could use a timeline descriptor since from what I read the pushback you get (mine included) seems to be that a single piece of media can absolutely [re]shape someone's entire worldview, just not immediately.
This seems like a semantic quibble at its core - you yourself admit in your reply "that there are a thousand other stops along the way", I'm not sure what your objection is when people point out that a single piece of media can indeed be the last stop, the straw that breaks the camel's back (which as written would presumably qualify for the purposes of your joke?). I'm not even sure we disagree at all. Maybe the argument is too big brained for me and I embody everything that's wrong with the Motte nowadays.
Yes, it is a semantic quibble.
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My Little Pony Friendship is Magic is singlehoofedly responsible for:
I would be a completely different person today if I hadn’t seen the first episode I ever saw, S1E4, at that exact moment in my life.
lol wut? Am I missing something
I'm pretty sure he's entirely sincere, although idk if it's an example of what I described or not.
He's sincere, we've discussed it before. Personally I watched one specific anime series, maybe 5 hours long, in one afternoon and that had pretty formative effects.
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I can't really narrate a personal experience I or a close friend of mine might've had without coming too close to doxxing myself (and I'm not a good enough writer atm to do it well), but things in the same vague category as 'fight club' have, in my direct experienced, causally affected peoples' life trajectory or ideology at the largest scale and in a non-butterfly effect way. Something doesn't need to change someone's entire worldview, nor does it need to require zero pre-existing affinity to the topic to work, to be the kind of thing you're claiming doesn't exist.
It's definitely a judgement call to say that it isn't mostly the 'straw break camel back effect' and I can't really justify it in any compact way, but I'm like 99% confident these individual instances of watching/reading media have several orders of magnitude more impact than others in these peoples' lives. It's sort of similar to a spiritual experience, I think.
iirc, 'this book changed my life' of thing isn't that uncommon a trope for notable figures, and while most cases are clearly exaggerated I think some cases aren't.
(I don't think this makes it reasonable to worry about individual pieces of media though.)
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